One way to cut e-mail overload: Here’s what it looks like when you read a discussion list on the web, rather than by e-mail. (Click to enlarge)

For more than a decade, e-mail discussion lists have been a mainstay of conversational media — and I think they’re likely to continue to remain popular. E-mail is approachable even to total online newbies.

However, since everyone is on e-mail overload, discussion lists end up presenting a problem: clutter. Sure, you can cut down on list clutter via daily digest postings — but if it’s a busy list, scrolling through a digest posting gets to be tedious.

Since I am constantly overwhelmed by e-mail, I find that feeds or web-based reading can be better ways to participate. Of course, these options aren’t available from every list service. If you value the online discussions you’ve joined but can’t handle the e-mail, here’s some advice…

READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE over at my other blog, The Right Conversation. You can leave a comment there too, if you like…

My current Second Life Avatar, with neither a name nor appearance she likes, is thoroughly confused by this environment.

Since Second Life, the virtual online world populated with avatars and live events, has become so popular, I decided I should check it out. It seems a natural fit with my work in conversational media, because conversation and interaction are reported to be the lifeblood of that "world."

I’m just getting started, but so far I’m pretty frustrated.

Here’s the issue: I’m not a gamer. That is, I’m not into video games, multi-player or otherwise. I never have been. I never cared for role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons either. It’s just not my thing.

Therefore, I don’t tend to naturally enjoy the process of learning how to navigate a virtual environment. That’s not fun for me, it’s drudgery….

Here’s something I don’t get, and I’d love it if someone well versed in US copyright law could explain it to me: Why must a copyright notice include a year? Especially if no notice is required for copyright protection?

Having to assign a year to a copyright notice makes things rather confusing in online media. For instance, In a blog or any other site where fresh content regularly appears, there typically is a date assigned to each item (at least in the metadata, if not displayed). But then… there generally is a visible copyright notice that appears throughout the site and is managed by a template. So if you look up archived content from previous years, you’ll view the older content on a page that bears the copyright notice for the current year.

That doesn’t make much sense to me…

My colleague Steve Outing recently reminded his readers to update the year in their online copyright notice. This made me wonder whether a year is really a legal requirement. So I looked it up. Here’s what the US Copyright Office says:Continue reading →